Jeffries: Pot Arrests Are ‘Classic Entrapment’

Assemblyman and congressional hopeful Hakeem Jeffries recorded a testimonial for a new online advocacy campaign pushing the decriminalization of possessing small amounts of marijuana – a proposal Gov. Andrew Cuomo formally endorsed yesterday.

Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat who is carrying this bill with Buffalo Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Mark Grisanti, says the Legislature needs to make this change to “finish the job that we started” back in 1977, chaning the penalty for carrying a small amount (25 grams) of pot – even in plain sight – from a misdemeanor to a violation.

The assemblyman, who is battling NYC Councilman Charles Barron in a primary for retiring Rep. Ed Towns’ seat, said when people are stopped by the police and comply with a demand to turn out their pockets, only to be subsequently charged with a crime when it’s revealed they’re carrying marijuana, that is an exmaple of “classic entrapment.”

He also railed against the fact that this happens more in communities of color, even though studies show affluent, younger whites use pot in equal – if not greater – numbers than the blacks and Latinos who are more often charged.

“It cannot be the case that marijuana posession is a crime for some folks when it’s not a crime for others when a dividing line is race,” Jeffries concluded. “And there have been mayors and governors and presidents, all of whom have acknowledged to using marijuana when they were younger. We didn’t criminalize those individuals. We should stop criminalizing tens of thousands of young people for doing the same thing.”

More videos can be found here. Several of them featuring people who have been who have been, according to advocates, illegally searched and falsely charged for marijuana possession in New York City.

On June 12, hundreds of advocates will travel to Albany lobby for this bill. The next day, community groups and national organizations will gather in New York City as the City Council votes on Resolution 0986, which calls for an end to these racially biased, costly, unlawful arrests. The resolution, co-sponsored by a majority of Council members, is expected to pass.

Interesting political aside: Jeffries was featured front-and-center at yesterday’s press conference with the governor. This was interpreted by some observers as a tacit indication that Cuomo is very much interested in seeing the assemblyman defeat Barron, who, as you’ll recall, ran a long-shot primary challenge to Cuomo in 2010 and didn’t have anything nice to say about him.